What service does Media Center use for Movie artwork?

[jlathem]

I've started ripping my DVDs to M4V. I used MetaX to add artwork and metadata, and I put a them in a Movie library. They show up in WMC and play ok. However, some show artwork and some do not.

I discovered that the artwork that does show is not the embedded art from the file. Since it takes a few seconds to display, I assume it's hitting an external service to look it up. I also determined that I can get some movies to work by carefully setting the Title in the metadata. For example, "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Widescreen Edition)" failed, but when I edited the title to just "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets", now it works. The file name doesn't matter, just the Title tag in the metadata.

I've seen YAMMM, but I don't want to have to put every movie in a subfolder. Since Media Center seems capable of figuring out some of the artwork, I should be able to get it to work for all of them.

Does anyone know what service is being used, or have any tips on getting the artwork to work correctly? Thanks!

[DavidinCT]

If your using the movie library, You NEED to put each movie in a subfolder if you want meta data and art for each movie. It might find a few but, you will end up with tons of problems with art...Trust me on this.

Easy way, put each movie in a folder by the name of the movie, install YAMM, point it to your movie folder and it should update everything as it goes...

Always put your movies in a sub folder...
Like
C:\Movies\Movie 1
C:\Movies\Movie 2

With file names as the same as the folder.

C:\Movies\Movie 1\Movie 1.mkv
C:\Movies\Movie 2\Movie 2.mkv

If you DO Not use YAMM or another movie manager, if WMC does not find it (and it's very slugish when you get more movies), then you need to MANUALLY download a image file, copy it to the movie folder, and name it folder.jpg to get it to show up.

Good luck, Setting this up can be a pain but, once you get it setup and use YAMM , drop a movie in a folder, copy the folder over to your "movie" folder and YAMM updates art and meta data...it really works good.

[DrSmith]

I agree with DavidinCT. Always put your movies in a sub folder.

And in every sub folder I have a folder.jpg file that is my preferred movie artwork image, usually downloaded from imdb.com. WMC uses my folder.jpg file every time as far as I can tell.

I do not use YAMM. I do have all my movies in .m4v format. I use a freeware program called Mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/) to embed a movie poster in each of my m4v files as well.

Good luck. Even without YAMM, WMC does a nice job, IMHO.

[Space]

I don't know about other file types, but if you just rip a DVD to a folder, some ripper programs can create a <name>.dvdid.xml file which allows WMC to lookup the metdata for the movie. If the ripper does not have this option, you can do a search for the file on the Internet for any particular movie.